Terms of endearment - "TwoBy"

Interestingly enough my father-in-law, with his heavy English accent would
refer to some building lumber as
"two bee" (limey accent).
I do not usually hear this phrase in my neck of the woods, near the CanUSA
border.
Is this common in the US or where you are?

I've heard it on US telly programmes before now. Well, maybe not "two-
bee", more like "two-bah" I suppose it depends on the speaker's
particular accent and how certain words are pronounced - "bee"/"bah"
would just be local ways of pronouncing 'By' (somewhat obviously).

Don't think I ever heard "four" pronounced w/ only a single sillyuble
either there or in VA Piedmont...is hard to get the E TN twang in print,
though. The VA drawl is a little easier altho the olde
Scotch/Irish/English "hoose" and "aboot" sorta' throw a spanner into
it... :)
When kids were young and still in VA, folks came to visit while elder
daughter was learning numbers and counting..."wun, two, thu-ree,
fo-ah..." At that point Grandma (the KS-bred/raised Ed major) was
simply aghast...
--

-----------------------------------
It's an expression that is as old as the hills and was resurrected by
Al Roker, a network news personality on morning TV (Today Show) about
5 years ago.
Since then it has spread like wild fire across the TV announcer world
with every Tom, Dick and Harry trying to use it in their news
broadcast.
Lew

Yes.
But you might find twobafour and threebetwo.
Don't ask me why but I know I say the above (In the English Midlands).
However, just to confuse this issue, I am more likely to say fourbetwo
than twobafour!

I would suspect that since he was in construction that twoby refereed to
the dimension of the would he was using. In the US (Canada?) there
several common wood sizes. These are some common nominal sizes in inches
that you could find in a lumber yard.
2X = Twoby.
2 X 2 Bracing and other light uses
2 X 4 Studs in the walls of a house. This is the most common size in
building a house.
2 X 6 rafters for the roof.
2 X 8 floor and ceiling joists.
These size go up to 2 x 14 with the larger sizes becoming rarer as the
size increase.
I have heard twoby to refer to several sizes of these structural piece
of wood. i.e I need 10 twoby, (usually 2X4) 6 sheet of plywood, etc.
Depending on the building this size could be increase depending on the
load on the piece of wood.

Yeah...and damn proud of it too. He shouldn't have been here as the people
couldn't understand a word he was saying when he felt his usual caustic
personality was due, even though attempting to live in Canuckistan for 30
years. He lives alone as a hermit now, as far as we know....LOL
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"Limey Lurker" wrote in message
An Englishman with an English accent? What is the world coming to?

Define an English accent :-)
I live in the Midlands, just south of Coventry, go across to the other
side of Birmingham, around Dudley and Stourbridge and with the combination
of accent, dielect and voice intonation you'd hardly think we spoke the
same language - as for the North East, they're from another planet!

It's the same here in the US. Some parts of the country do not use the
whole alphabet, and others do not pronounce vowels the same as others.
I spent 11 weeks with people from all over the US. The worst problem was
from some guy from Odessa, Texas. It took me two weeks before I could
understand what he was saying.
It turned out to be one of my best friends at that place.

Yeah the different dialects are a riot, really. It's a study in itself and
very entertaining.
I find other dialects pronounce words more correctly, by logical analysis
using English grammatical rules, and then there are words they completely
screw up, too. Very interesting stuff.
English accent is one from Jolly ole' England. For years my wife thought I
was picking on her when laughing about some of the Brit accents. Now she
laughs too. Well, I still get it once a year, whether I deserve it or not.
------------------------
"Stuart" wrote in message
Define an English accent :-)
I live in the Midlands, just south of Coventry, go across to the other
side of Birmingham, around Dudley and Stourbridge and with the combination
of accent, dielect and voice intonation you'd hardly think we spoke the
same language - as for the North East, they're from another planet!

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